


Three Weddings and a Funeral

by el_em_en_oh_pee



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, F/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-04
Updated: 2008-02-04
Packaged: 2017-10-16 21:33:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/169572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/el_em_en_oh_pee/pseuds/el_em_en_oh_pee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He shifted nervously, patting his pocket every so often. It was still there (as it had been, for the past fifteen times), but it always served to check again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Weddings and a Funeral

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt "Marriage" at the lj community badgerchallenge. Um, I've never seen _Four Weddings and a Funeral_ , so I sort of just made a play off the title, rather than the actual movie. The different sections in this are largely unrelated, and in a sort of reverse chronological order. Also, thanks to [](http://acidpop25.livejournal.com/profile)[**acidpop25**](http://acidpop25.livejournal.com/) for talking me through some of this, and [](http://capitol-barbie.livejournal.com/profile)[**capitol_barbie**](http://capitol-barbie.livejournal.com/) for always inspiring me. ♥ (ALSO, all of these characters are canonical, however minor. So.)

* * *

  
Ernie shifted nervously, patting his pocket ever so often. It was still there (as it had been, for the past fifteen times), but it always served to check again. And again. And --

\-- there she was. Sitting at a picnic table, the wire probably digging into her legs (although Ernie tried not to think about this so much), the sunlight gilding her hair and neck. She was wearing muggle clothes: a white, blousy top and a skirt, and she'd never looked so beautiful. His breath caught in his throat, and he sat in the seat opposite her.

"Hello, Ernie," she said, sipping her drink through a straw (she'd fallen in love with straws quicker than she'd fallen for Ernie, which sometimes upset him but mostly made him proud, for introducing her).

"You'd look really good with one of those straw hats," he blurted, and flushed. At her inquisitive eyebrow, he elaborated. "Really classy, like."

"Would I," she said, sipping her drink again and biting at some of the sugar crusting the edge of her glass. "I hope you don't mind that I took the liberty of ordering for you?"

"Not at all," he said, gallantly. "Er. Tracey?"

"Yes?" she asked, putting her glass down and licking a trace of sugar from the corner of her mouth (Ernie gulped. It was unfair, really, how gorgeous she was). At his nonresponse, her brow furrowed. "Is everything all right?"

"Never better," he said, quickly, reaching across the table to flip one of her braids. "You're so beautiful."

"I love to hear that," she said, smirking, tossing her hair.

"Yes, but," he said. "Yes, but I have a very important question."

Tracey immediately turned serious. "What is it?"

Ernie gulped and got out of his chair, running a nervous hand through his hair. "I love you, Tracey."

"And I love you," she said, biting her lip and looking adorably worried. An unspoken question formed at the end of her words, hanging pregnant in the air during a mutually silent moment.

After this pause, he reached for her hand, stroked it a bit. "So." He sunk down to one knee, grimacing at the wet seeping from the ground through his trousers, trying not to look directly at her. "So. Tracey Elaine Davis-Nott. Will you marry me?"

She didn't respond, so Ernie risked a glance. She looked actually shocked and, for some reason, a bit upset. She was looking off to a side that was decidedly not near Ernie, biting her lip, tugging and twisting at the ends of her hair, the corner of her mouth twitching, tugging decidedly downward.

"Forget I asked," Ernie said, flushing horribly, after almost two minutes of silence, almost two minutes of this. He moved to stand up, brushing furiously at his knees, mouth twisting horribly. Wishing, above everything, that he hadn't asked.

"No," she said, suddenly, her voice thick and low (he stopped trying to stand). She turned slightly, looking directly at him, and he noticed that her eyes were especially bright, that she was blinking rapidly. "I don't want to forget."

"But if my asking makes you _cry_..."

"Ernie." Tracey reached forward, brushed a thumb over the corner of his mouth and across his cheek. "I'm sorry. I just -- you just took me by surprise."

 _And you're very sorry, but you'd rather not_ , he added mentally, swallowing against a rapidly-forming lump in his throat. He nodded, not quite meeting her eyes.

"You're the second person to have asked me that," Tracey mused, slowly regaining her usual composure as she reached to her neck, rubbed the ring that hung on an ever-present chain.

Ernie knew this story, of the first husband, the best friend, the accident. Sometimes it grated at him, to know that she was still so obviously in love with him, still grieving... but he always forced himself to see her side of things, and really, she was obviously in love with Ernie, himself now. He hadn't seen a _huge_ problem in her retained devotion to Theodore, even these five years after his death, until approximately now. "Tracey..."

"I'm just worried," she said. "That I'll lose you, too. I know it's not logical--" (but Tracey was rarely logical) "--but what if I'm cursed, and anyone I marry is destined to die within a month?"

"One person doesn't make a trend," Ernie said, as earnestly and reassuringly as he could manage. He unconsciously patted his pocket again.

"I love you," Tracey said, biting her lip, reaching absently behind herself for her drink. "I'd love to say 'yes'. It's just. I just." She sipped, but it was more a biting-on-the-straw event than actual drinking.

"Then do," Ernie suggested, wincing a bit as he adjusted the weight on his knee. "Say yes. Marry me. I'll do everything to ensure that I won't die before we're both very old, I promise."

Tracey looked off, above Ernie's shoulder, chewing the straw until it cracked. "Yes," she said at last, and looked directly at him. "Yes, Ernie, I'll marry you."

And Ernie fumbled in his pocket for the box, fumbled in the box for the ring, and fumbled with her hand until the ring slipped on her finger. Tracey half-dragged him up off the ground, blatantly ignoring the muddy knee he'd been kneeling on, and he pulled her up out of her chair in turn. He kissed her, cautiously, his eyes fluttering closed, and held her hand (almost protectively) after they drew apart.

+++

He was more than a little bit drunk when he proposed, and she wasn't far behind. They were in Vegas, of all places, for some sort of Quidditch-meets-Quodpot match that the Minister and his diplomats decided was a good idea, and they were married before either of them came out of it by a witch in a Marvin: the Mad Muggle costume, of all things. Ginny had just won the match for the Harpies; Zacharias was on security detail. They hadn't even ever fucked before: she happened to be in the same bar as him after the win, and he'd happened to find her fucking _hot_ (and sweaty. Zacharias was a fan of sweaty).

After they'd slept off the alcohol, and realised their sudden state of matrimony, Ginny told Zacharias that she'd be more than happy to let him retract his proposal and, subsequently, the marriage.

"No," he told her. "You can break it off if you want to, but I got myself into this, and I'm not going to give it up just because I was drunk and I hardly know you."

"That's so sweet," Ginny said, sneeringly. "You love me."

"I don't," Zacharias said, entirely frank. "But unless you have different plans, I could try and learn to. I started this marriage, I made this commitment -- no matter how inebriated I might have been -- and I'm not going to give up after, oh, eight hours."

"Even if I make you _totally unhappy_?"

"I," Zacharias announced, drawing himself up, "am a Hufflepuff. We don't give up this easy." And then, as an afterthought, "Unless you're too scared to try."

"Oh, you are so on," Ginny said, half glaring. "I can weather this better than you can."

"You're on."

They ended up lasting two years -- two years of heated arguments and heated sex, two years of finger foods and broomstick races, two years of living larger than their means. They parted amicably (to the surprise of almost everyone), and largely for business reasons, and for almost six years after their split, they'd still hook up on the odd weekend they were both in the same general vicinity (this hooking up came to an end, ultimately, at the wedding of Ernie Macmillan and Tracey Davis, to which Ginny brought Seamus Finnigan as a date).

+++

They always whispered that marriage wasn't for them, ever since they started secretly seeing each other in seventh year, continuing on through to adulthood. "It isn't that we don't love each other," Hannah would tell people when they asked. "It's that we love each other enough that we don't need a legal document stating that we're committed."

"It isn't because such a marriage isn't technically _legal_ yet," Susan would add. "Because, you know, where there's a will, there's a way. It's because, even if it were commonplace, the only promise ceremony-type thing we need is the ceremony of our everyday lives, and the promise in that."

But they did have a wedding of sorts. No one knew about it, but they whispered promises and exchanged locks of hair, Transfigured spoons into lockets to keep their mingled hair safe, before the final battle. They never mentioned it after that -- each privately wondered if the other even remembered -- and pretended to everyone else that they hadn't done anything of the sort. But Hannah wore her locket, invisible, every day for the rest of her life, and Susan kept hers on her person at all times, whether it was worn or carried in a pocket or purse.

From the first year after school, when they went public with their relationship, everyone heralded them as the perfect couple. Free of jealousy, free of argument -- these people weren't present for the heart-rending arguments (rare, but existent), but Susan and Hannah did lack a certain amount of jealousy, to keep such faith in something unproclaimed by anything but hidden pendants on hidden chains.

People came to them for advice: Ernie, on his worries that Tracey still loved Theodore more than would allow her to date him (and then, later, to marry him); Zacharias, on his accidental wedding to Ginny and the week of fierce jealousy he felt after she dumped him for the last time, for Finnigan; Wayne, on his utter lack of a love life. They never had much to give, but they did their best to be as reassuring as possible. And they were happy.

+++

She visited the hospital every day: this was the first thing Ernie noticed. He was there to visit Justin (his best friend, permanently addled by an accidental curse); she was there to visit her husband. They talked sometimes, about their respective reasons for going every day. Theodore hadn't noticed anything, _she_ hadn't noticed anything until it was too late for magic to help, she told him. The Healers were doing everything they could do.

Ernie counted the tear-tracks on her face during Theodore's last week. They had only been married a month, the Healers told him, and he'd been in the hospital for the majority of that time. It was something extending from a horrific childhood, there was nothing to be done.

Ernie felt a rush of empathy every time he saw her pull her cloak tighter as she left the ward. He bought her tea twice, patted her shoulder awkwardly when she trembled as she drank. "I'll help you," he promised, doubting he could keep the promise and hating himself for that.

"Thank you," she replied, hollowly, not meeting his eyes.

The last morning, Tracey wasn't even there. One of her friends had convinced her to not spend the entire day at the hospital, and when she got there mid-afternoon, Theodore was all but gone. Ernie watched from behind a plant, and cried when she did, when Theodore's hand slipped from hers. Her sobs, they tore at Ernie, and he questioned himself for caring so much.

She invited him to the funeral. "For being so kind," she said, a sense of wonder tingeing her tears. "For caring."

At the funeral, Ernie hugged her, certain that, as this was the end to her marriage, so too was it the end to his seeing her daily. He tried to tell himself that he didn't mind.


End file.
